Monthly Archives: October 2013

This week’s story is from Minnesota Hauntings by Ryan Jacobson, published by Adventure Publications. This incomparable collection features only the scariest, most surprising Minnesota ghost stories. From the author’s own ghostly encounter to a family terrorized by a fiendish toy, the book’s 21 tales are reportedly true! Best of all, they were written with a campfire in mind, so they’re perfect for sharing aloud. Or read it alone… if you dare!

This week’s story is from The Reasonable Ogreby Mike Barnes with illustrations by Segbingway, published by Biblioasis. In the world of The Reasonable Ogre, magic is nothing if not paradoxical. Ogres can indeed be reasonable, prisons may prove porous, gifts often come disguised as curses, and springs gone dry are only waiting to resurface. At once comic and moving, troubling and restorative, Mike Barnes’s original stories are here to remind us that fairy tales aren’t about the happily-ever-after: they’re about the strange detours we take trying to get there. With seventy drawings from the striking brush of Segbingway.

This week’s story is from Something in My Eyeby Michael Jeffrey Lee, published by Sarabande Books. Michael Jeffrey Lee’s stories are bizarre and smart and stilted, like dystopic fables told by a redneck Samuel Beckett. Outcasts hunker under bridges, or hole up in bars, waiting for the hurricane to hit. Lee’s forests are full of menace too–unseen crowds gather at the tree-line, and bands of petty crooks and marauders bluster their way into suicidal games of one-upmanship. In Something In My Eye, violence and idleness are always in tension, ratcheting up and down with an eerie and effortless force. Diction leaps between registers with the same vertiginous swoops, moving from courtly formality to the funk and texture of a slang that is all the characters’ own. It’s a masterful performance, and Lee’s inventiveness accomplishes that very rare feat-hyper-stylized structure and language that achieve clarity out of turbulence, never allowing technique to obscure what’s most important: a direct address that makes visible all those we’d rather not see.

This week’s story is from TheSlow Fixby Ivan E. Coyote, published by Arsenal Pulp Press. With The Slow Fix, Ivan returns to her short story roots in a collection that is disarming, warm, and funny, while it at the same time subverts our preconceived notions of gender roles. Ivan excels at finding the small yet significant truths in our everyday gestures and interactions. By doing so, she helps us to embrace not what makes us women or men, but human beings.